Why ICE’s Airport Arrests Aren’t the Whole Story

My least favorite kind of column to write is the “ICE is arresting people in a new place or a new way” column. 

That’s because I know some of you read the column to answer “How worried should I, personally, be about ICE in that context?” 

I cannot even begin to answer that question for you, because it’s not just about the intricacies of your own immigration case but it’s about your personal fears and anxieties, and, conversely, your priorities and goals. 

Someone with absolutely no likelihood of getting deported from the United States may reasonably decide to avoid Immigration and Customs Enforcement because they know it could trigger anxieties. Two people with identical immigration circumstances — if any two people really do have the same circumstances — might make opposite decisions about whether to go to work when there’s a rumored ICE roadblock in their neighborhood based on how badly they need money. 

So to be clear: This is not a column about whether you, specifically, should stop taking planes now that ICE is collaborating with the Transportation Security Administration to arrest some immigrants at domestic airports. It’s a column about who is getting arrested, and how the government is going about it. It’s also a column about the other immigration policies that airport arrests intersect with. The goal is to give you as much information as possible about how these things work, so you can decide on your own.

Who’s getting arrested

ICE has confirmed they are conducting arrests at airports of some people who have expired visas. Now, having an expired visa doesn’t mean you are necessarily out of status in the U.S. — in some cases it means that once you leave the U.S., you may lose your immigration status and be unable to return for a long time. 

The cases that have most attracted attention, however, aren’t of people who have active legal status. They’re people who have applied for legal status, whether that’s asylum, a green card, or something else, and are waiting for a decision on their application. 

Having a pending application isn’t the same as having full immigration status. But historically, the government has made it a practice to not arrest people with pending applications. 

You could see this as a matter of principle. If you are trying to encourage people to follow immigration law, you also demonstrate that people who are trying to follow immigration law will be safe — but there’s a much more straightforward reason. An immigration judge, in general, will not order somebody deported if they have a pending application for certain benefits with USCIS. Instead, they’ll put the case on hold until USCIS makes a decision, and then reopen the case if the person ends up getting rejected.

Most administrations, then, would consider this wasted effort: you can arrest someone you know you can’t deport, but why would you bother? This administration does not see things that way. After all, if they did, they wouldn’t be arresting people at their own immigration court hearings — by definition those people are already in deportation proceedings, and they can’t be deported until those proceedings are completed. It appears this administration does not like to engage in traditional cost-benefit analysis. 

It’s possible that ICE would prefer to be arresting only people it can easily deport, but here’s the issue: Because it’s given arrest quotas to its officers, it’s now incentivized officers to arrest people who can easily be found and who will definitely be unarmed. It’s also possible that ICE thinks it’s worth arresting and detaining people with pending applications for asylum or green cards before USCIS because it thinks it can coerce them into withdrawing those applications and accepting deportation. 

Of course, if USCIS were capable of processing those applications in a timely fashion, there wouldn’t be so many people with applications still pending. And now that USCIS keeps setting policies that will increase backlogs, more people are likely to run out of visa validity while waiting for a ruling from USCIS.

How people are getting arrested at airports

The short version of this answer is “increased collaboration” between ICE and TSA, the Transportation Security Administration. The slightly longer answer, according to ICE officials, is that TSA agents have been encouraged to send “tips” to ICE about people on flight manifests who ICE can arrest.

But that isn’t much of an explanation! Without knowing what information is being shared between ICE and TSA, we can’t know what information TSA is acting on when it sends ICE a “tip.” 

Even though TSA and ICE are both part of the Department of Homeland Security, that doesn’t mean that one agency has access to everything the other agency knows. Every single government database is governed by a set of policies that spell out who is allowed to access the database and for what purposes. And even if you tried to violate those and plug different databases into each other — as DOGE reportedly tried to do with Social Security data — it would be a complete mess. They’re not set up to be compatible.

However, thanks to records obtained by the nonprofit American Oversight, we do know that TSA and ICE signed an agreement last May to increase information sharing for immigration enforcement. 

We don’t know the specifics of that agreement because most of the memo is redacted. There is language in the memo about limiting access to and retention of “personally identifiable information” (a technical term that means what it sounds like) to individuals who need to know it to carry out their duties under the memo. This means that, per the agreement, a random TSA agent can’t just poke around an ICE database and see who they can find. (Of course, ICE agents aren’t supposed to just poke around their own databases either, but there are plenty of cases where they abuse their authority to, say, stalk an ex.)

The term “tips” makes it sound like TSA is making calls to ICE in individual cases, not that it has the ability to just feed ICE a list of everyone scheduled to fly that day and see who ICE flags back. But it’s unclear whether those individual calls are based on information TSA already has from ICE, or whether it’s purely a matter of what information TSA has. 

The risk a person faces at the airport depends on which of these possibilities it is. The more information TSA and ICE are sharing, the wider the net they can cast — so someone who doesn’t currently have valid immigration status would have a significant chance of getting caught. If collaboration is purely based on when a TSA agent thinks someone might not have immigration status, however, that might mean they’re just making a subjective assessment (again, we don’t know what information they’re acting on) based on other indicators, like having a foreign passport or birthplace.

Then, of course, there’s the question of how careful ICE is and whether they’re making sure they have the right person. But that’s always a question with ICE. And this brings me to my last point: The overwhelming majority of arrests happening right now are not at airports. We’re in the middle of an incredibly intense period of ICE enforcement. Arrests are happening everywhere. 

People are focusing on airports because the airport arrests are being recorded by bystanders and posted to social media — which is to say, the airport arrests are happening in places where there are bystanders who aren’t themselves arrestable by ICE. But most arrests are happening with ICE showing up at someone’s home and arresting them there. The arrestees’ phones are confiscated and sometimes sold to pawn shops. When ICE isn’t sending along a videographer for its own sizzle reels — which they seem to be doing less often — no one outside the front door sees anything at all.

That doesn’t make ICE invisible to the people in the immediate vicinity. But if it’s not on social media, it’s harder to believe it’s truly happening everywhere, all the time. Just remember: There’s a difference between 500 arrests, and one arrest you’re seeing 500 times in your main feed. When you’re deciding whether it’s safe for you specifically to take a plane — or go to the grocery store, or anything else — remember to think about what is actually happening most often, not what you’ve seen the most hype about.